A startup founded during the early days of DeFi is now backed by a financial giant. Gauntlet, which helps institutions and crypto firms allocate their digital assets, raised $125 million from the Japanese financial conglomerate SBI Holdings, the startup’s founder and CEO Tarun Chitra told Fortune.

The round closed in June and had no other participants, he said, declining to specify at what valuation he raised the money. The fundraise is the biggest infusion of capital into Gauntlet since its founding in 2018 and dwarfs the startup’s Series B in 2022, when it raised almost $24 million at a $1 billion valuation in a round led by the marquee fintech investor Ribbit Capital.

SBI, which was spun off from SoftBank in 1999 and is now fully independent, is one of the most active institutional investors in digital assets. Worth more than $10 billion on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the company has bought up stakes in the crypto lender Morpho, the blockchain company Ripple, and the stablecoin issuer Circle.

“I really think this year SBI will increase our investment activities and even operational activities in the U.S., because of the clarity on regulation and pro-crypto, pro-innovation, pro-competition environment,” Kefei Lin, general manager at SBI, told Fortune.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/07/09/gauntlet-defi-vault-risk-curation-tarun-chitra-sbi-holdings-fundraise/?utm_source=reddit/

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